Round One to Jitterbug

As my portions at dinner and at lunch shrink, I'm beginning to find myself spending more and more time reheating leftovers. A dab of this, a dab of that. They take up a lot of room in the fridge, but I find that it certainly saves some time in preparing a meal when you've got lots of leftovers on hand! My technique isn't very creative yet: I'll hunt around the fridge for a minute, looking for items that have been there longest - I won't let anything stick around longer than two or three days - then make sure I've got a good serving of veggies to fill up my plate. The crowning touch? A dill pickle. Just a little something "new" to keep things exciting. I'm hoping to see this pay off soon when it comes to my grocery bill.

Ruth Berolzheimer, author of The American Woman's Cook Book (1945), applauded thrifty housewives for their creative use of leftovers and recognized how critical this was when you were "cooking for two." This was particularly important during the war when women's work in the kitchen took on a fire and urgency like never before... It was unpatriotic not to use every last bit of the food you'd purchased or grown! But leftovers had to be combined carefully. Men, women, and children heading off to the war plant or to volunteer work of some kind needed nutritious, well-balanced meals and dishes that tempted the tastebuds.

And so in the month-of-menus in the back of this cookbook, you find lots of examples of ways to incorporate leftovers - and planned leftovers - into new meals. When Steamed Rice is on the dinner menu one night, the reader is instructed to prepare extra rice for the next day's Spanish Rice at lunch. The water in which prunes have been stewed for breakfast one morning is chilled and served as juice two days later with a squeeze of lemon. Leftover Corn-meal Mush is refrigerated, then sliced, sauteed and served for lunch the next day with Cheese Sauce. "Scraps" of leftover vegetables are served in a cream sauce in Buttered Noodle Nests at the lunch table.

Berolzheimer's favorite things to do with leftovers are a bit more dramatic. Practically anything could be mixed with a white sauce and some potato or egg and fashioned into a croquette. Little bits of this or that could be popped on skewers and slid under the broiler. Bell peppers, acorn squash, and tomatoes were perfect for stuffing with mixed leftovers.

Wartime episodes of "The Great Gildersleeve" are peppered with ads for Kraft's Pabst-ett --- melt it into a cheese sauce and turn leftover vegetables into a meal "your whole family will love." You could even entertain company with leftovers if you did a nifty thing like pressing Kraft Dinner into a ring mold then serving with creamed bits of this or that in the center. (Garnish with sliced tomatoes.)

I almost became a coyote's leftovers the day before yesterday! I got home about 8:00 from my morning walk at the park, pulled into a space between two cars in the parking lot of my apartment complex, locked my car, turned around and a coyote was standing right in front of me, blocking me in. "This is so not a dog," I said to myself. It wasn't baring its teeth or growling or anything --- I don't know what I'd have done if it had! I really didn't have time to be afraid. Just started shouting - "Get away! Get away!" - and shaking my baseball cap at it. It trotted a little ways away and I started walking very deliberately towards the stairwell up to my apartment. By the time I'd reached the bottom step, the coyote had trotted right after me. So I started shouting at it again. It trotted on into the courtyard while I booked it up the steps, dashed into my apartment, and barricaded the door! (Like that would've helped.) I looked down into the courtyard from my bedroom window and could see the coyote sniffing around looking for it's next meal.

Now if that isn't motivation to lose some weight! I must have looked a tempting morsel. Who needs to chase the Roadrunner when a plump little Jitterbug is handy?